ItsGeekToMe.co

Welcome to the 1-year anniversary issue of It’s Geek To Me!  It’s hard to believe it’s been an entire year since one little e-mail from me to Del Stone launched this endeavor.  Now, fifty-two issues later, I want to say a big thank-you!  Thanks to the Northwest Florida Daily News and Freedom Communications for running it.  Thanks to the many of you who read the column, both in the print edition, and online.  Thanks to those who have invited me to appear at your events, and thanks to those of you who attended these events, and made me and Spouse Peripheral feel so welcome.  I’ve had lots of fun becoming known as the “NWF Daily News Geek” or simply “The Geek” to those in the know.  Here’s hoping the next year is as good, and that I can continue to try and bring a little stress relief into your trying technology times! 

Here are some fun facts from the first 52 issues of “It’s Geek To Me”.

Number of Q&A published: 81 (plus countless others via e-mail, and at appearances)

Number of Tips of the Week published: 21

Number of e-mails I received: 912

Number of SPAM e-mails filtered by Gmail: Over 6,000

Number of glowing comments I received: 46

Number of “thanks for nothing”, “you broke my computer”, and “you’re a moron” e-mails I received: 7

TIP OF THE WEEK: Did you notice the very high number of SPAM e-mails above?  I set up my Geekmail address for the sole purpose of receiving e-mail for this column, and when I first started using it, I didn’t get any SPAM.  In less than a year it’s gone from being brand new to receiving an average of 18-20 SPAM messages every day.  This happened because my Geekmail address appears in a fresh webpage online every week, and there are specially designed programs called bots that constantly search the web for e-mail addresses.  Professional spammers are willing to pay big money for verified e-mail addresses, so ones appearing on new pages routinely get harvested and sold.  You can minimize your exposure to this kind of activity by not using your primary e-mail address when posting messages to chat boards, or sites like MySpace, FaceBook, and YouTube.  When using such sites, take advantage of the many free e-mail services (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, to name just a few).  That way, if your account gets overwhelmed with SPAM, you can just stop using it, and get a new one.  Another way to combat this problem is, when you absolutely must post your address, don’t post it in its standard form of ‘name@isp.domain’.  The bots that harvest e-mail addresses look for this pattern to identify an e-mail address.  You can mask your e-mail address by breaking the pattern, such as ItsGeek2Me(at)gmail(dot)com.  Any human reading that should understand, but a bot would very likely overlook it.  By the way, in spite of my high SPAM count, you are NEVER at risk sending e-mail to me.  I neither publish nor share the addresses of e-mail I receive with any third parties.